The best find in a slashdot thread on comparing search engines is Phil Bradley’s task-oriented engine list; go bookmark it now.
From the same thread was a graphical comparison tool of google and yahoo search results for your query string.
Martin Fowler is very interested in his employer ThoughtWorks’s social, and consequently business, model (emphasis is mine):
Our belief is that an organization with the right social model can jump business models. This is increasingly important because business models don’t last as long now since everything is changing so much faster.
Tim Bray considers unswitching (from Apple, rather than to it); the issues he mentions include lack of corporate transparency (he uses the word ‘infofascism’), mediocre laptop, and inability to run Sun products.
Since my personal ‘tecosystem’ could always use a little more diversity, I’m not wanting to switch but to add an Apple. In this light, Tim’s post doesn’t make me pause, but I’ll dig for other unswitch stories out of curiosity. Price is the classic complaint, but the transparency issue Tim gripes about is an interesting Apple vulnerability.
I’m still a bit undecided about where to enter the Mac line, and I don’t need this kind of distraction in the next few months, so it will be Summer before I bite, if ever. That comfortably accommodates Tiger even if the rumor is really a rumor, and not a crack of light that somehow slipped out of the box.
A friend just asked in jabber what I am up to, and I said “I’m reading a history of wikipedia.” The project started in 2001, and already
the nonprofit venture is the largest encyclopedia on the planet. Wikipedia offers 500,000 articles in English - compared with Britannica’s 80,000 and Encarta’s 4,500 - fashioned by more than 16,000 contributors. Tack on the editions in 75 other languages, including Esperanto and Kurdish, and the total Wikipedia article count tops 1.3 million.
(via robotwisdom; seeing Jorn Barger filtering links again after a year and a half away is the best thing that’s happened to me today)
From an Easter egg hunt at Parc Montsouris (some nice park photos here, #1073-#1094, from Andrew Boucher). Official Parc Montsouris pages in French and English are unfortunately pretty drab, but have some historical information.
Fowler’s CodeAsDocumentation entry starts:
One of the common elements of agile methods is that they raise programming to a central role in software development - one much greater than the software engineering community usually does.
The overall entry is concerned with documentation, and it rings as true as most everything else I’ve read from him over the years. But what caught my attention this time is the quote above: it’s a simple and obvious statement, but it compels me to post anyway.
It seems to me that so much falls out of the primacy given (or not) to coding and the code itself, and I’m tempted to plunge into an essay on the political, historical and philosophical aspects of all this. But this is a blog entry, I’m not supposed to spend the time here.
Fowler links Jack Reeves’s essays; they’re just superb, not only for treatment of the subject, but also as a kind of memoir of trying to stimulate a debate.
Clemens Vasters has a good thread on declaration conventions for serialization in indigo. My two centimes here.
The EU has eased the debt rules. In theory, the short-term budget deficit limit is still 3% of GDP, but there is now a lot more wriggle room:
Under the accord, governments that run excessive deficits “temporarily” can escape sanctions, Mr. Juncker said, if they show the spending serves a worthwhile goal, like financing research and development, defense or economic and social restructuring.
I’m not sure how excited the 23 countries that are not France and Germany will feel about this.
NewScientist has a list of 13 things that do not make sense; the first, on the placebo effect, is my favorite:
DON’T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
That’s old news for me, but I hadn’t heard this follow-up:
This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it’s not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
I had vaguely considered the placebo effect a psychological one, but a Skeptic’s Dictionary entry enumerates a few different theories.
Jabbering with someone about “turtles all the way down,” I came across Avi Bryant’s blog entry on language implementations. Acknowledging someone else’s comment that Ruby and Python are at approximately the same level, he asserts that Smalltalk is a level up, because it’s mostly written in Smalltalk.
“Who cares?” I started, but once he went into discussion of tools, I got it. My Smalltalk work is (unfortunately) limited to about 20 months in 1997-98, but it was a singular experience. Among other things, it was the first time I could surf the implementation of my own environment, learning about things like thread schedulers, and finding bugs in the CORBA implementation (David Bell, I miss those days).
Avi appears to work at cincom which I’ve just learned is where ParcPlace-Digitalk Smalltalk ended up. I imagine him (based on 10 minutes surfing his blog; I’m feeling reckless today) to be a wistful Smalltalk guru, and he’s probably right to be: Smalltalk strangely never made it the way it maybe should have. A quick surf for the old products I used (VisualWorks, ENVY, DST, GemStone) is a bumpy ride over a lot of web rubble.
[ed. 2005.03.29: Avi is neither chez cincom nor wistful]
Avi closes:
But really what I’m talking about is a philosophical difference, not a technical one: to Smalltalkers, it’s essential that as much of a system as possible be implemented in Smalltalk, whereas this simply isn’t a priority for the scripting language community, and it’s the priorities rather than the individual implementations that draw me to Smalltalk.
There are currently three comments on that post: Ruby in Ruby is coming, Python in Python is coming, and the current, C-heavy implementations of these languages are already dead slow according to a set of OO benchmarks showing 70X compared to Smalltalk–itself only 3X the benchmark leader C#.NET.